CHAPTER 14
Pitohui’s Trap
The plasma grenade that Fukaziroh accidentally shot off exploded on the ship’s port side near the prow, completely obliterating everything within its blast radius.
The guest cabins along the waterside were blown out, the ceiling was blown out—even the lower deck and exterior hull, too.
If someone was hypothetically watching the ship from the outside, they would have seen a blue orb appear first, then debris exploding outward and falling into the sea, then an enormous hole left behind in the side of the ship—as well as a huge volume of seawater flooding into it.
The giant hole appeared over the waterline, and more and more seawater began to spill inside.
While the entire ship might have been 1,600 feet in length, the explosion happened just a few dozen feet below the bridge. The people there certainly felt the vibration and sound of it.
“Ah, that must be SHINC and Llenn’s team going at it,” Pitohui deduced, putting her Satellite Scan terminal away.
A minute ago, two teams were on the lowest deck and barely separated by any distance, which she’d certainly seen on the map.
“What was that?” Eva asked. “A plasma grenade?”
Pitohui shrugged. “Sorry about all this. I was the one who gave the little grenadier some plasmas this time around, so that’s probably what it was.”
“……”
Eva said nothing. If such a weapon had been shot at close range immediately following the scan, and it exploded, there was no question what happened to the four in its path.
“They’re wiped out,” Ervin murmured. The pigtailed woman heard him and closed her eyes.
As a matter of fact, Tanya had escaped the blast and fought hard, nearly taking out M in the process, but Eva couldn’t know that from here.
“Whatever happened, we’ll find out the details at the next scan. More importantly, now…”
Pitohui switched from speaking to her human partners to speaking to Clara.
“Clara. That punched a big hole in the side of the ship, didn’t it? How much water are we taking on?”
“A large amount of water is entering the port side of the Deck 1 area. When the ship begins listing to the left, even more flooding will result. It may mean the ship sinking happens earlier than the previous estimate.”
“Ah, how scary,” said Pitohui in a tone that contained no fear whatsoever.
“Please, do not be frightened,” said Clara automatically. The computer could not process subtler emotions.
Then the ship began to lean to the left. The angle was sharper than when it was turning. It was clear from the shift that this was an abnormal state of affairs.
“Shall I take in more water to starboard, in order to balance out the ship? It will result in a greater amount of flooding overall,” Clara asked.
“……”
Pitohui did not give her an immediate answer. She looked at her watch. It was 1:23, two minutes from the next scan.
Twenty seconds passed in silence. Eventually, David broke the silence to ask, “Hey, what’s the holdup?”
“Level us out for now, Clara,” said Pitohui. “Then stop when it gets to one thirty.”
“Understood. I will endeavor to even out the ship by one thirty.”
It was an odd order, but the computer gamely accepted the challenge, to the skeptical looks of David, Eva, and Ervin.
“What are you thinking?” Boss asked.
Pitohui just showed her palm, an indication that she would explain later. Then she continued, “Clara, show me the wiring layout of the ship. And the location of the sprinklers.”
That only further confused the other three. A ship diagram appeared on one of the control monitors.
“What’s going on?”
MMTM had no idea about the explosion or the increased flooding.
“Feels like we’ve been listing to the side for a bit… This isn’t a turn, is it?”
Kenta and Summon were in the lead position, but now they stopped. Naturally, so did Jake behind them and Bold in the rear.
The four were in the left hallway of Deck 10. That was the floor with the courtyard. They were walking past guest cabins at the moment, but if needed, they could cross through one of the interior-side rooms to get out into the courtyard at any moment.
They were heading for the bridge, of course. To defeat the team of betrayers.
The thought of battle ahead was tantalizing for them all, but Kenta summed up their mood by saying, “There’s no point to this if the ship sinks first…”
MMTM stopped for a minute or so, hoping to figure out what was happening to the ship.
“Oh, it’s going back,” Kenta observed. It was slowly tilting to the right, regaining its balance.
Bold said, “That was nerve-racking… It would be terrible if we finally reached the safety of the ship, only to have it sink on us.”
“Could you sink this ship, if you intended to? I just assumed that once it started floating, it would be stable until the event was over. Am I wrong about that?” Lux wondered.
It was the present team leader, Jake, who answered, “It’s possible… Remember, you can destroy a whole lot of stuff in GGO…including every possible vehicle you can ride. So this ship probably isn’t an exception. And that madwoman is on the bridge, too. There’s no telling what she might try to do…”
Jake shivered, remembering being skewered through the eye last time. Worried, he said, “Which is easier for handling the tilt, the interior hallways or a more open space?”
“I don’t know. Obviously, I don’t mind interior combat, but I don’t like my feet being unsteady,” said Kenta.
“The benefit of a tighter area is that we can lean on the walls…but even that’s not ideal,” said Summon.
“So the open areas are where we can actually make use of our firepower,” said Bold.
Jake the leader was silent for five seconds.
“……”
He checked his wristwatch. The time was exactly 1:24. One minute until the next scan. No, fifty-nine seconds. Fifty-eight. Fifty-seven…
“We’re going into the courtyard! Then we’ll wait for the scan.”
Considering how MMTM always charged their way through things, it seemed like a passive, weak strategy. If David were still the team leader, he would not have made such a choice.
“Got it.”
“Roger.”
“Might as well play it safe.”
But the other three members had no objections, so away they went.
MMTM traveled to the end of the hallway leading to the courtyard, waiting for 1:25 to arrive. Jake crouched before the wall with the i symbol, with the others arranged around him at intervals of a few yards.
“It’s so wide open… Makes you forget you’re actually in the middle of a ship…,” Kenta marveled, poking his head around the corner.
The courtyard ran about 1,100 feet long and 160 feet wide, bordered by two huge structures on either side. It could be considered a massive shopping street.
On the sides were a number of stores, just like any outdoor shopping mall. Some of the places were commercial shops, others were restaurants and cafés. It was all ruined now, of course, but it was still in pristine enough condition that Squad Jam participants could immediately see what it would have been like originally. It was “decorated” to suggest that the refugees had lived there, with mattresses, blankets, and clothes strewn inside and outside the stores.
In the center and down the sides of the courtyard were paved pathways wide enough for a car to drive down. They were almost surely not using real stone, but some kind of lightweight tile.
On the sides of the central path were planters and trees for the passersby to enjoy. It gave the place a parklike feel. The plants had dried up and died, and there were signs that the planters had been dug up and used as impromptu fields. Perhaps they planted potatoes. The occasional bench in the area was rusted over.
Around the middle of the courtyard, directly in the center of the ship as a whole, was an amusement park area. It had a merry-go-round, spinning teacups, and a rotating swing ride. There was even one of those swinging Viking ship rides, which was odd, considering it was already on a giant ship.
The courtyard was open on top, meaning it was susceptible to rain. Everything exposed to the elements had more rust than elsewhere, around the stores and attractions.
Nothing had power out here. Either the electricity was dead or the lines had been cut off long ago. But given the light coming down from the reddish-gray sky, there wasn’t much need for illumination.
The bridge, where they would find the betrayers, was above and beyond the prow end of the courtyard. How MMTM acted next would depend greatly on the location of the enemy team.
If members of BTRY were blockading themselves in the bridge, that would be a stroke of good fortune. They could pass right through the courtyard without worrying about a fight, race up the stairs at the front of the ship, then, at the bridge, they could engage in interior combat, their forte as a team. They’d simply have to be on the lookout for ambushes or traps.
If BTRY split up and hid elsewhere around the ship to fight back, however, that would also be a welcome development. In that case, MMTM would speedily approach and attack, maintaining firepower supremacy, and finish them off one by one. That would be similar to what they did to the team inside the spaceship in SJ1.
Of course, given that their former leader, David, was among BTRY now, he would be aware of that strategy.
If Pitohui the madwoman was among them, she was almost certainly going to have some strategy that would be both effective and completely unexpected. Something that would eliminate their strength: good interior combat skill and effective teamwork.
“So what are they gonna do…?” Jake wondered, four parts worry to one part anticipation, right as the scan started.
The earlier scan started from the upper decks, but this one began from the lowest. It seemed it was going to change for each scan.
Jake had his companions watch the ends of the hallway while he viewed the scan for the rest of the team.
There was no one on Decks 1 or 2.
On Deck 3, three members of LPFM were near the prow. It was about the same location as the earlier scan, only two decks higher. It seemed as though they’d simply climbed the stairs. If they weren’t being aggressive, it probably meant they were taking their time and healing up.
“Pink shrimp’s team is still on the third floor, fore. Recovering? Just watch out for her, since she moves faster than a human being can. The women aren’t on the same deck as them. Highly likely they’ve been wiped out,” Jake reported, covering the details quickly. He waited for more information as the scan rose through the ship.
Despite being one second per floor, it felt slower. He waited, praying for Deck 10 to come sooner.
On the left side, adjacent to the courtyard near the stern, it displayed their locations accurately. Since SHINC hadn’t appeared on any of the floors up to this point, his suspicion that they were eliminated turned to certainty.
It also told him that none of the BTRY members were on the same floor—and that they knew where MMTM was now. He tensed, waiting for David to launch a grenade from a higher deck, but there was no incoming attack.
Did that mean they weren’t nearby?
“Amazons are definitely out. No Team Betrayers on this floor. Waiting for higher scans,” said Jake as his teammates waited with nerves taut. The three had their fingers on the triggers of their rifles.
The scan continued upward. Decks 11, 12, 13, and 14 passed without any results.
“Nothing up to Fourteen yet…”
Next it passed through Decks 15 and 16.
“Still nothing at Sixteen…”
Were they hanging out on the bridge? A team with both David and Pitohui—hanging out? The question marks floated over Jake’s head.
Next was Deck 17.
“What the—?! They’re all still on the bridge!” he said, stunned.
The Satellite Scanner showed that all four members of Team BTRY were clustered at the edge of the ship’s bridge. In other words, there were no humans capable of attacking them anytime soon.
“Okay! Courtyard is clear! Everyone, run!”
“Got it!” “Uh-huh!” “Okay!”
Freed from the tension of the moment, the other three happily responded, and MMTM rushed out into the courtyard.
Even after the scan had finished with each floor, the player’s location would remain displayed for the next sixty seconds. On Pitohui’s device, she saw the dots with the names of Jake, Bold, Kenta, and Summon rush into the open area.
Whether a sign of confidence or a message that they were coming, they showed no intention of hiding what they were doing.
And when she saw them heading toward the fore of the ship, Pitohui gave an order: “Activate.”
“They’re going!”
“Yes! Wipe ’em out!” yelled the audience when they saw MMTM charge.
“Oh?” They also spotted something before anyone else did. “Is that rain?”
Droplets were running across the screen at a diagonal angle. There were only a few at first, but then they increased in number until it quickly became a furious shower.
“Huh? Is it raining?” Kenta wondered, noticing the storm of droplets as he ran straight toward the group. He looked up and saw water falling through the space between the sides of the ship, and within moments, his face was drenched.
The large droplets splattered against his face and naturally went down into his mouth.
“Gah! It’s salty!” He grimaced.
“What is this? Is it seawater instead of rain?” Summon wondered. The natural rain in GGO clearly had something weird dissolved into it, but it had never been as obviously salty as this. At first glance—er, taste—it was clearly seawater.
As he ran, Jake gasped, “Why is seawater falling from the sky…?”
“You don’t think the sea’s risen all the way up to the top of the buildings to the sides?” Bold asked preposterously. If that were true, the fore and aft sections of the ship would have been submerged long ago.
“Wait, that’s not rain. That’s a sprinkler,” Kenta observed, pointing out a spot on the ceiling. From over the edge of the balcony of one of the interior cabins ran a small hose that was gushing out water.
From there, it was unclear how many hoses were producing water. They seemed to exist on each deck going up, so there were far more than just ten or twenty.
All the makeshift sprinklers combined to emit a tremendous amount of seawater. This artificial rain soaked the cobblestones of the courtyard in moments, creating puddles. The spray of the hoses and the splashing upon impact decreased visibility so that their goal, the fore end of the courtyard, was no longer visible.
There was still five hundred feet to go. They’d crossed a little more than half of the open area.
“This is a mess,” Kenta muttered as he raced through the spray.
Behind him, Summon was more optimistic. “But it’s not actually damaging us, and it makes it harder for them to see us, right? What’s the harm?”
True, even if BTRY suddenly came down to attack, there was much less worry about a possible sniper.
So MMTM rushed through the buckets of water pelting them and approached the amusement park area. Only three hundred feet to their destination now.
In less than a minute, the courtyard was completely soaked. And either the drainage system of the courtyard was weak to begin with or the pump wasn’t working at all, because the rain didn’t wash away—just piled up higher and higher.
They kicked up water as they ran, the liquid reaching the top of their boots now. They were completely soaked, but no one was concerned about that.
Their guns were waterlogged, but good military hardware wasn’t going to malfunction from a little adverse weather. Even after being submerged in water for a little while, the gunpowder in the cartridges would still ignite, so players could even shoot them underwater if they really wanted. They just wouldn’t shoot very far.
If anything, in rain or spray like this, optical guns would suffer the biggest loss of power. That didn’t matter here, because nobody had one.
“We can do this! If we fight them indoors, we’ve got a chance to win!” said Jake, the leader. He smiled, and some seawater got into his mouth. “Bleh, that’s salty!”
At that moment, Kenta was in the lead, passing the side of the merry-go-round. Summon was right at his side, a step behind. Jake was next to the teacups. Lastly, Bold was running past the Viking ship.
“I’m sure. Turn it on,” Pitohui commanded at the bridge.
An instant later, all four members of MMTM were dead.
All at once, their bodies seized up.
Their arms and legs went as stiff as if they were tied down. The guns fell from their hands and dangled from the slings around their necks and shoulders.
The men were as stiff as boards, and their entire bodies glowed red with the light that indicated damage suffered. The momentum of their running carried them forward, however, smashing face-first into the puddles on the ground and leaving them facedown under the layer of water that had built up.
Not one of them budged, and within a few seconds, the marker reading DEAD had appeared over each of them.
On the monitors, the four suddenly flashed red, fell over, and were instantly ruled dead. The number four appeared on the side of the screen indicating fatalities, and not a single one of the audience could understand what had just happened.
“Wh-what was that?”
“What the fuh…?”
“Uhhh?”
While the rain made it hard to see, the image of the men running had been quite clear. The crowd could tell that they hadn’t been shot or hit by a grenade explosion.
For one thing, the only team that would have attacked them, Pitohui’s Betrayers, were still on the bridge. On another monitor, Pitohui stood before the bridge’s console, while Ervin, Eva, and David pointed guns toward the room’s entrance in case of an enemy invasion. Naturally, there were many walls between this place and the courtyard.
So was it the other surviving team, Llenn’s squad? That was also impossible. The trio was still huddling in the Deck 3 hallway, waiting for M to recover from his serious injuries.
So who had killed MMTM, and how?
“I think that probably did the trick. You can stop now, Clara,” Pitohui said, who of course knew how they had died—because she was responsible. “But we can’t be sure, so will you go and check? Three of you, just in case. When the next scan comes, all three of you check it. I don’t think they’ll be coming up yet, but be very careful of Llenn making a charge at us,” she told her teammates at the entrance to the bridge.
David looked conflicted, Eva was as stoic and stern as ever, and Ervin’s face was hidden, but they said, “Got it.”
“All right.”
“Let’s go…”
And left the bridge together at 1:27.
Once her companions exited the bridge along with the marker signifying the presence of a camera, Pitohui was left all alone.
“Ugh…”
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